[Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content

[Anthony]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> Education
> has value because of scarcity - someone with a degree can earn more
> than someone without a degree because there are fewer people that can
> do the jobs they can do.


So if most people had a degree, people with degrees would earn less than
people without degrees?


> We're not talking about whether it is
> valuable to an individual for them to have certain knowledge (that's a
> pretty easy question to answer - it's clear "yes"), but whether it is
> valuable to society (whatever that means) for that knowledge to exist
> (that's rather more difficult - I doubt you could reasonable argue
> "no", but it is debatable whether the question is well posed).


I guess you have to explain the "whatever that means".

But anyway, I guess you threw me off by mentioning "academia".  I go back to
my original answer :).  The monetary value of the existence of knowledge is
the amount one is willing to pay someone to create (or discover) that
knowledge.

As someone who used to work in "research and development", I can attest to
the fact that there are people who are willing to pay for the
creation/discovery of knowledge, even outside of academia and government.